Facebook has a big new ad campaign for live video

On Friday the social network announced a new ad campaign for its live video feature in the U.S. and U.K. that will include TV spots, online ads, billboards, bus ads, and more.

The campaign signals the growing importance of live video to Facebook, which has already put the feature front and center in its app and paid media outlets and celebrities millions of dollars to broadcast on its platform.

"We designed our campaign to reflect the authenticity of Facebook Live," Facebook CMO Gary Briggs said in a statement on Friday. "All of the content for the campaign—every video, every image—was shot using Facebook Live on a phone. Many of the videos you'll see in our TV spots are from real people around the world, and none of the dialogue was scripted."

The ads were created by The Factory, Facebook's in-house ad agency led by former TBWA and Apple creative director Scott Trattner.

Facebook Facebook hasn't said how many of its 1.7 billion users broadcast live video, but the company said on Friday that the number of people who stream video at any given time has gone up by 4X since May.

Regardless of how many people are broadcasting, live videos have certainly increased one of Facebook's most important metrics — the company said people on average comment over 10 times more on live videos than regular videos.

Facebook Live began as a pet project of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's and was initially made available to verified profiles and pages in August 2015. Facebook has since made the feature available to everyone and baked it into its main mobile app.